Letters from America

Here at Design Week, we tend to focus on projects created within the shores of our own little island, but this week a couple of projects from our American cousins have caught our eye.

The first, The Feedback Loop Notebook Project, is a fundraising effort from 25 leading letterpress printers. This philanthropic gang was asked to create 50 unique notebooks, using materials donated by Mohawk Fine Papers.

Notebook by Dock 2Notebook by Smart and Wiley

All of the notebooks will be sold on the Felt & Wire shop and 100 per cent of the proceeds will go to Design Ignites Change, a social enterprise that helps school children think about how to solve social issues using design.

Notebook by Repeat Press

The project, which launches on 8 September, shows just how versatile letterpress can be – timely too as it’s making a comeback in discerning studios – and is a good example of how designers can get together to help out a good cause.

Notebook by MK Printer

Another collaboration but of quite a different kind, The Exquisite Book is a five month-long project that has seen 100 designers, illustrators and artists create an interconnected surrealist drawing.

The Exquisite Book, designed by Also

Based on the game Exquisite Corpse, where players fold a piece of paper and must draw different body parts without seeing the one before, the book features collaborative drawings, only the borders of which were seen by the other artists.

Inside the Exquisite BookArtists join up the marks to make a collaborative drawing

Each artist was given two weeks to completer their page, after which the work was collected by curators US design studio Also, who also designed the book. A fun and unusual project, the book has gained a foreword by top author Dave Eggers and will be on Sale from Chronicle Books this month. Look out for a similar (but unconnected) wall-scale project at Design Event North East in October.